Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In February, 111.75 work hours have been dispatched among 10 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 8h.
• Ben Hutchings did 12.75 hours (out of 11 hours allocated + 7.25 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 5.50 extra hours to do over April).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 7 hours (instead of the 14.25 hours he was allocated +, compensating the extra hours he did last month).
• Damyan Ivanov did nothing out of the 7.25 remaining hours he had, he opted to give them back and come back to LTS work later.
• Guido G nther did 13 hours (out of 12 hours allocated + 4.25 remaining hours, leaving 3.25 extra hours for April).
• Markus Koschany did 14.25 hours.
• Mike Gabriel did nothing and opted to give back the 8 hours allocated. He will stop LTS work for now as he has other projects taking all his time.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 10 hours (out of 12h allocated + 1.50 remaining, thus keeping 3.50 extra hours for April).
• Scott Kitterman did a few hours but was not able to provide his report in time due to sickness. His next report will cover two months.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours started to increase for April (116.75 hours, thanks to Sonus Networks) and should increase even further for May (with a new Gold sponsor currently joining us, Babiel GmbH). Hopefully the trend will continue so that we can reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full-time position. At the end of the month the LTS team will be fully responsible of all Debian 7 Wheezy updates. For now paid contributors are still helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy. They are also looking for ways to ensure that some of the most complicated packages can be supported over the wheezy LTS timeframe. It is likely that we will seek external help (possibly from credativ which is already handling support of PostgreSQL) for the maintenance of Xen and that some other packages (like libav, vlc, maybe qemu?) will be upgraded to newer versions which are still maintained (either upstream or in Debian Jessie by the Debian maintainers). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 6 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 22 months)
• Blablacar (for 21 months)
• Linode LLC (for 11 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 21 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 21 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 19 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 15 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 13 months)
• Dalenys (for 11 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 7 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 7 months)
• Sonus Networks
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 22 months)
• Offensive Security (for 22 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 22 months)
• Evolix (for 21 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 21 months)
• MyTux (for 21 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 19 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 18 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 17 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 16 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 16 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 15 months)
• NUMLOG (for 15 months)
• WinGo AG (for 14 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 11 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 8 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 6 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 3 months)

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What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 13th and March 19th 2016:

Toolchain fixes

• Petter Reinholdtsen uploaded naturaldocs/1.51-1.1 which makes the output reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
• Damyan Ivanov uploaded libpdf-api2-perl/2.025-2 which will make internal font ID reproducible.
• Christian Hofstaedtler uploaded ruby2.3/2.3.0-5 which sets gzip embedded mtime field to fixed value for rdoc-generated compressed javascript data.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: diction, doublecmd, ruby-hiredis, vdr-plugin-epgsearch. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• adduser/3.114 by Niels Thykier.
• borgbackup/1.0.0-3 by Danny Edel.
• firefox-esr/45.0.1esr-1 by Mike Hommey.
• gzip/1.6-5 by Bdale Garbee, original patch by Valentin Lorentz.
• httperf/0.9.0-5 by Reiner Herrmann.
• leafpad/0.8.18.1-5 uploaded by Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libsdl1.2/1.2.15+dfsg1-4 by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo.
• mpc123/0.2.4-4 by Reiner Herrmann.
• openhpi/3.6.1-1 uploaded by Bryan Sutula, likely fixed upstream.
• pbsim/1.0.3-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• pdnsd/1.2.9a-par-3 by Reiner Herrmann.
• phyml/3:3.2.0+dfsg-2 uploaded by Andreas Tille, fix by Kevin Murray.
• polyml/5.6-3 by James Clarke.
• psocksxx/1.1.0-1 uploaded by J rg Frings-F rst, original patch by akira.
• python-pip/8.1.1-1 by Reiner Herrmann.
• reapr/1.0.18+dfsg-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• rows/0.1.1-3 uploaded by Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• seqprep/1.1-5 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Dhole.
• subliminal/1.1.1-1 uploaded by Etienne Millon, fixed upstream.
• tantan/13-4 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• tzdata/2016b-1 by Aurelien Jarno.
• xpra/0.16.2+dfsg-1 uploaded by Dmitry Smirnov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• lombok/1.16.6+ds-3 by Markus Koschany.
• python-skbio/0.4.2-1 by Kevin Murray.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #818128 on nethack by Reiner Herrmann: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, set LC_ALL to C, and ensure deterministic build order when running parallel builds.
• #818111 on debian-keyring by Satyam Zode: fix the order of files in md5sums.
• #818067 on ncurses by Niels Thykier: strip trailing whitespaces introduced when using dash as system shell.
• #818230 on aircrack-ng by Reiner Herrmann: build assembly code as a separate .o file.
• #818419 on mutt by Daniel Shahaf: use C locale when listing files to be put in README.Patches.
• #818430 on ruby-coveralls by Dhole: ensure UTC is used as the timezone when generating the documentation.
• #818686 on littlewizard by Reiner Herrmann: use the C locale in the script for iterating over the files.
• #818704 on strigi by Reiner Herrmann: sort keys when traversing hashes in makecode.pl.

Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 40 added and 5 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb has reported 16 FTBFS.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In February, 112.50 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 8h.
• Ben Hutchings did 14 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated + 10 extra hours remaining, meaning that he still has 7.25 extra hours to do over March).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 18 hours (instead of the 11.25 hours he was allocated, he will work less in March).
• Damyan Ivanov did 4 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated, leaving 7.25 extra hours for March).
• Guido G nther did 7 hours (out of 11.25 hours allocated, leaving 4.25 extra hours for March).
• Markus Koschany did 11.25 hours.
• Mike Gabriel did 8 hours.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 12 hours (out of 11h allocated + 2.50 remaining, thus keeping 1.50 extra hours for March).
• Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 11.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours continued to decrease a little bit. It s not worrisome yet but we should try to get back to a positive slope if we want to be able to do an outstanding job for wheezy LTS. On the positive side, TOSHIBA renewed their platinum sponsorship for another 6 months at least and we have some contacts for new sponsors, though they are far from being concluded yet. We are now in transition between squeeze LTS and wheezy LTS. The paid contributors are helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy. They are also taking generic measures to prepare wheezy LTS (for example to ensure all packages work with OpenJDK 7.x since support for 6.x will be dropped in the LTS period). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold (none this month).

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 5 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 21 months)
• Blablacar (for 20 months)
• Linode LLC (for 10 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 20 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 20 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 18 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 14 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 12 months)
• Dalenys (for 10 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 6 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 6 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 21 months)
• Offensive Security (for 21 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 21 months)
• Evolix (for 20 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 20 months)
• MyTux (for 20 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 18 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 17 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 16 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 15 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 15 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 14 months)
• NUMLOG (for 14 months)
• WinGo AG (for 13 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 9 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 7 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 5 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG

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My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS I did not ask for any paid hours this month and won t be requesting paid hours for the next 5 months as I have a big project to handle with a deadline in June. That said I still did a few LTS related tasks:

• I uploaded a new version of debian-security-support (2016.01.07) to officialize that virtualbox-ose is no longer supported in Squeeze and that redmine was not really supportable ever since we dropped support for rails.
• Made a summary of the discussion about what to support in wheezy and started a new round of discussions with some open questions. I invited contributors to try to pickup one topic, study it and bring the discussion to some conclusion.
• I wrote a blog post to recruit new paid contributors. Brian May, Markus Koschany and Damyan Ivanov candidated and will do their first paid hours over February.

Distro Tracker Due to many nights spent on playing Splatoon (I m at level 33, rank B+, anyone else playing it?), I did not do much work on Distro Tracker. After having received the bug report #809211, I investigated the reasons why SQLite was no longer working satisfactorily in Django 1.9 and I opened the upstream ticket 26063 and I had a long discussion with two upstream developers to find out the best fix. The next point release (1.9.2) will fix that annoying regression. I also merged a couple of contributions (two patches from Christophe Siraut, one adding descriptions to keywords, cf #754413, one making it more obvious that chevrons in action items are actionable to show more data, a patch from Balasankar C in #810226 fixing a bad URL in an action item). I fixed a small bug in the unsubscribe command of the mail bot, it was not properly recognizing source packages. I updated the task notifying of new upstream versions to use the data generated by UDD (instead of the data generated by Christoph Berg s mole-based implementation which was suffering from a few bugs). Debian Packaging Testing experimental sbuild. While following the work of Johannes Schauer on sbuild, I installed the version from experimental to support his work and give him some feedback. In the process I uncovered #810248. Python sponsorship. I reviewed and uploaded many packages for Daniel Stender who keeps doing great work maintaining prospector and all its recursive dependencies: pylint-common, python-requirements-detector, sphinx-argparse, pylint-django, prospector. He also prepared an upload of python-bcrypt which I requested last month for Django. Django packaging. I uploaded Django 1.8.8 to jessie-backports.
My stable updates for Django 1.7.11 was not handled before the release of Debian 8.3 even though it was filed more than 1.5 months before. Misc stuff. My stable update for debian-handbook has been accepted fairly shortly after my last monthly report (thank you Adam!) so I uploaded the package once acked by a release manager. I also sponsor a backports upload of zim prepared by Joerg Desch. Kali related work Kernel work. The switch to Linux 4.3 in Kali resulted in a few bug reports that I investigated with the help of #debian-kernel and where I reported my findings back so that the Debian kernel could also benefit from the fixes I uploaded to Kali: first we included a patch for a regression in the vmwgfx video driver used by VMWare virtual machines (which broke the gdm login screen), then we fixed the input-modules udeb to fix support of some Logitech keyboards in debian-installer (see #796096). Misc work. I made a non-maintainer upload of python-maxminddb to fix #805689 which had been removed from stretch and that we needed in Kali. I also had to NMU libmaxminddb since it was no longer available on armel and we actually support armel in Kali. During that NMU, it occurred to me that dh-exec could offer a feature of optional install , that is installing a file that exists but not failing if it doesn t exist. I filed this as #811064 and it stirred up quite some debate. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Nathan Willis covered our DebConf15 status update in Linux Weekly News. Access to non-LWN subscribers will be given on Thursday 24th. Linux Journal published a more general piece last Tuesday. Unexpected praise for reproducible builds appeared this week in the form of several iOS applications identified as including spyware. The malware was undetected by Apple screening. This actually happened because application developers had simply downloaded a trojaned version of XCode through an unofficial source. While reproducible builds can't really help users of non-free software, this is exactly the kind of attacks that we are trying to prevent in our systems. Toolchain fixes

• Mathieu Malaterre uploaded abi-compliance-checker/1.99.11-1 which drops the timestamps from the generated HTML reports and makes the generated .abi.tar.gz files reproducible. Original patches by Chris Lamb.

Niko Tyni wrote and uploaded a better patch for the source order problem in libmodule-build-perl. Tristan Seligmann identified how the code generated by python-cffi could be emitted in random order in some cases. Upstream has already fixed the problem. Packages fixed The following 24 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-curator, checkbox-ng, gant, gnome-clocks, hawtjni, jackrabbit, jersey1, libjsr305-java, mathjax-docs, mlpy, moap, octave-geometry, paste, pdf.js, pyinotify, pytango, python-asyncssh, python-mock, python-openid, python-repoze.who, shadow, swift, tcpwatch-httpproxy, transfig. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apparmor/2.10-2 uploaded by intrigeri, fixed upstream by Christian Boltz, with the same change suggested by Reiner Herrmann.
• ardour/1:4.2~dfsg-2 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• dcmtk/3.6.1~20150629-1 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by akira.
• deap/1.0.1-4 by Daniel Stender.
• firebird2.5/2.5.4.26856.ds4-2 by Damyan Ivanov.
• gamera/3.4.2+svn1437-1 by Daniel Stender.
• genometools/1.5.7-1 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• golang-github-go-xorm-core/0.4.4-1 by Alexandre Viau.
• klibc/2.0.4-4 by Ben Hutchings.
• libgtk2-perl/2:1.2496-3 by intrigeri.
• lsof/4.89+dfsg-0.1 uploaded by Laurent Bigonville, original patch by Lunar.
• monotone/1.1-6 by Markus Wanner.
• ndisc6/1.0.1-4 by Santiago Vila.
• privoxy/3.0.23-4 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• ruby-flexmock/2.0.0~rc1-1 by Antonio Terceiro.
• ruby-html2haml/2.0.0-1 by Lunar.
• tunnelx/20140102-3 uploaded by Wookey, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• wtforms/2.0.2-1 by Orestis Ioannou, original patch by Juan Picca.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• maxima/5.37-1 by Camm Maguire, report by akira.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #783152 on kmod by Lunar: export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in debian/rules.
• #799010 on 389-ds-base by Chris Lamb: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH value as the build date.
• #799206 on python-sqlalchemy-utils by Chris Lamb: sort the list of extra requirement.
• #799330 on cappuccino by Chris Lamb: pass a fixed seed to polygen.
• #799410 on segment by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build date.

reproducible.debian.net Tests for Coreboot, OpenWrt, NetBSD, and FreeBSD now runs weekly (instead of monthly). diffoscope development Python 3 offers new features (namely yield from and concurrent.futures) that could help implement parallel processing. The clear separation of bytes and unicode strings is also likely to reduce encoding related issues. Mattia Rizolo thus kicked the effort of porting diffoscope to Python 3. tlsh was the only dependency missing a Python 3 module. This got quickly fixed by a new upload. The rest of the code has been moved to the point where only incompatibilities between Python 2.7 and Pyhon 3.4 had to be changed. The commit stream still require some cleanups but all tests are now passing under Python 3. Documentation update The documentation on how to assemble the weekly reports has been updated. (Lunar) The example on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with CMake has been improved. (Ben Beockel, Daniel Kahn Gillmor) The solution for timestamps in man pages generated by Sphinx now uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. (Mattia Rizzolo) Package reviews 45 reviews have been removed, 141 added and 62 updated this week. 67 new FTBFS reports have been filled by Chris Lamb, Niko Tyni, and Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer. New issues added this week: randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases, python-ply_compiled_parse_tables. Misc. The prebuilder script is now properly testing umask variations again. Santiago Villa started a discussion on debian-devel on how binNMUs would work for reproducible builds.

& another week of perl (5.18) related bugs has gone by:

• #710968 src:libperl5i-perl: "libperl5i-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #720428 src:maildirsync: "maildirsync: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  apply patch from Damyan Ivanov, upload to DELAYED/2
• #720430 src:msva-perl: "msva-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  add patch to fix POD encoding, upload to DELAYED/2
• #720431 src:oar: "oar: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  add patch to fix POD encoding, upload to DELAYED/2, then moved to 0-day with maintainer's permission
• #720496 src:primaxscan: "primaxscan: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  fix POD, upload to DELAYED/2
• #720499 src:spamassassin: "spamassassin: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD failure"
  apply patch from Damyan Ivanov, upload to DELAYED/2
• #720788 src:libconfig-model-openssh-perl: "libconfig-model-openssh-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Config/Model/Tester.pm in @INC"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #720869 src:xacobeo: "xacobeo: FTBFS with perl 5.18: inc/MyBuilder.pm issues"
  add patch for perl 5.18 syntax error (pkg-perl)
• #720960 src:libconfig-model-itself-perl: "libconfig-model-itself-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failure"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #720961 src:libimager-qrcode-perl: "libimager-qrcode-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: syntax error at inc/Module/Install/XSUtil.pm"
  send patch to the bug report
• #720973 src:mailagent: "mailagent: FTBFS with perl 5.18: POD issues"
  send patch to the bug report
• #720976 src:libdbix-dr-perl: "libdbix-dr-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: Can't use string as a hash ref in (Makefile.PL)"
  add some debugging information to the bug report
• #720990 src:libperl-apireference-perl: "libperl-apireference-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #721288 src:libauthen-krb5-admin-perl: "libauthen-krb5-admin-perl: FTBFS: error: 'kadm5_config_params' has no member named 'admin_keytab'"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)

It was a surprisingly busy week. The commit notification service CIA was shut down about a week ago, so I spammedsent some messages to announce that KGB could be used as a replacement, and Don Armstrong wrote a great tutorial on how to set it up. As a result, many people came to us to use our bots, or to set-up their own instances. Since then, 14 Debian sub-projects started using our bots, and we know of at least two other bots being run independently. For a small project that was mainly developed and maintained for our own use, this was quite some unexpected popularity! With bug reports and feature requests starting to flow in, Damyan Ivanov (who's basically the one doing most of the work these days) sat down and produced a new release. So, I present you, KGB 1.16! What's new

• Added support for CVS.
• Ability to pass a commit URL along with the commit, to provide a direct link to the change-set. This requires both client and server to be updated.
• Some changes in the colour-scheme.
• A new script, kgb-add-project, eases the addition of new projects to the server configuration.

Bug fixes

• Honour 'repository' setting in client configuration file.
• Make the server not die on reloading.
• Re-open server log properly on reload.
• Fix forced single-line commit mode.
• Documentation fixes, brushed-up packaging.

Coming up soon

• Short URL support!
• Broadcast channels that report commits from all repositories (like CIA did on #commits).
• New --fake option to kgb-client, to test configurations.
• Add --save option to kgb-add-project to save changes to the config file.
• Move URL shortening to bot (configurable).
• Ability to use client-driven color schemes. Can be used to disable all color.

Tags: Planet Debian, KGB

good news: from looking through RC bugs in the BTS, it seems that more & more people are starting to join the RCBW effort!

& here's my usual list for the past week:

• #633935 src:fim: "fim: Please Build-Depends on libjpeg-dev, not libjpeg62-dev"
  do as the bug report says, upload to DELAYED/2
• #634400 src:morituri: "morituri: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add upstream patch (via Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen), upload to DELAYED/2
• #643464 src:radeontool: "radeontool: FTBFS: radeontool.c:42:5: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  apply patch from Jonathan Nieder, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643473 src:python-kinterbasdb: "python-kinterbasdb: FTBFS with firebird-dev (2.5) -- removed defines"
  do a QA upload with the patch from Damyan Ivanov
• #650788 src:python-osd: "python-osd: binary-indep doesn't build python-osd"
  update build-* target in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #652245 src:tomoe: "tomoe: FTBFS: dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-source --after-build tomoe-0.6.0 gave error exit status 1"
  send ideas for fix to BTS, later NMUd by a fellow DD
• #652700 haildb: "haildb ftbfs if libcloog-ppl0 is not installed"
  sponsor NMU by Tobias Frost, upload to DELAYED/2
• #654255 src:cmucl: "cmucl: FTBFS: Error: Unbound symbol."
  suggest manual close, done by maintainer
• #654257 src:newlib: "newlib: FTBFS: cannot find the library sys/linux/liblinux.la' or unhandled argument sys/linux/liblinux.la'"
  apply patch from Ubuntu / Wookey and Steve Langasek, upload to DELAYED/2

As a Debian administrator, power user or contributor, one often goes to look for information about a package, a bug, a developer or a message from the mailing lists. If you are in this case, you may be interested in the Firefox/Iceweasel extension Debian buttons , written by Damyan Ivanov and packaged by myself. Description When installed, this extension provides five buttons, that you can place in your Firefox or Iceweasel toolbar. These buttons take the text from the X11 PRIMARY selection and act as shortcuts to the web pages corresponding to:

• a package from the archive;
• the development of a package (Package Tracking System);
• a bug report (Bug Tracking System);
• a Debian Developer's packages (Developer's Packages Overview);
• a message from the mailing-lists.

Typical use case Let us imagine you see the following sentence on IRC:

12:42 < Tanguy> I am packaging a cool Firefox/Iceweasel extension (ITP #654896)!

If you want to check out the corresponding ITP report, just double-click on the bug number to select it (do not worry about the leading hash or even the possible trailing bracket, it will be handled), and click on the BTS button on your browser toolbar: here you are! Depending on your needs and habits, this extension may considerably speed up and simplify your quests for information. At least, it does for me, so I hope you will enjoy it too!

RCBW - #22 With a mini-rush in the week-end, I'm now back on track to the weekly schedule of RCBW; here are this week's squashes:

• bug #565274 - tex4ht - test and close bug fixed by recent binNMU
• bug #553553 - phpsysinfo - fix dir-or-file-in-var-www, based on a patch by Mats Erik Andersson
• bug #553496 - doc-central - fix dir-or-file-in-var-www, sponsor NMU by Mats Erik Andersson
• bug #559821 - libtunepimp - fix libltdl CVE (bonus fix bug #476378), patches by Yavor Doganov
• bug #568982 - sqldeveloper-package - port from dos2unix to fromdos, patch by Michael Musenbrock
• bug #534721 - libhpricot-ruby1.8 - error in printing tags to stdout (fixed upstream in a version already in Debian)
• bug #564680 - gnugk - rebuild against firebird 2.1, as requested by Damyan Ivanov (important bug blocking RC bug #549062)

About this week highlights:

• In his latest RC-bug statistics, Tolimar has pointed to the RCBW description as inspiring. That's good, I hope more and more people can find it inspiring (in fact, that's why I wrote it). A handful of people doing RCBW is pointless, unless as a side-effect we manage to change the culture of our project in order to be more collaborative on how we reach a release.
• I've been amazed by how many RC bugs are "stuck" just because no one took care of establishing communication among the appropriate people. That of course happens when the maintainer of the bug has been unresponsive, but some investigations of the bug is usually enough to make the appropriate people (upstream, porters, related package maintainers, ...) aware of it ... and then the bug will "mature" all alone.
• Josselin has announced the Debian/GNOME bug weekend for the next weekend (27-28/02/2010): an initiative to collaboratively triage GNOME-related bugs in Debian. For large-enough packages (and GNOME fits that definition for quite some different notions of "large"), such efforts are as badly needed as RC squashing: if you liked RCBW, you can't miss the GNOME bug weekend

Finally, it happened! I became a Debian Developer! I wish to thank everybody involved in this process: from those who helped me in my initial packaging efforts, to who actually created the account. Many thanks to the pkg-perl team for accepting newbies and helping them: props to Damyan Ivanov, Gregor Herrmann, Gunnar Wolf! Thanks to Debian-Med and Debian CLI: they always believed in me, and I had a great time in these teams. A special thanks goes to Andreas Tille, who advocated my NM candidature. Thanks to my two AMs, Bart Martens and Bernd Zeimetz. Even if my NM was long, difficult and not so flawless, it all went good, at the end . A special thanks to Enrico Zini: he was the first DD signing my GPG key, thus allowing me to have more "rights" (being a DM), and experience some more responsibility than I previously had. Thanks to his "Become a DD. NOW!" right after checking my ID in Palermo -- Enrico, it finally happened! Thanks to Christoph Berg, Ron Lee, and Stephen Gran, which handled the final steps of the overall process. And now, dapal is here to break the world. Be warned!

I've been feeling like I've been neglecting Lintian, but actually, looking at the changelog, I've been doing about a release a month for the last several months. So it's more that a release a month isn't keeping up, quite, with the influx of bugs these days. To think I'd gotten it down to about 80 open bugs earlier this year.... Anyway, this release is almost entirely BTS cleanup, with no large changes or structural work. I think I knocked around 30-35 bugs off the list, which should get us down to somewhere in the 120 range. There's still some work to do to get under 100 again. There are lots and lots of little changes, mostly cleaning up false positives. The main new test additions are a bunch of new init script checks from Raphael Geissert and the extension of various script checks to example scripts, thanks to Damyan Ivanov. This should take care of nearly all the normal bugs and the easy minor bugs, but there are still a ton of wishlist bugs asking for new checks or expansions of existing checks. If anyone out there feels like poking at some fairly straightforward Perl code, I always try to make time to discuss possible approaches to implementing wishlist requests.

when I woke up today (after sleeping in for the first time with my new roll-top in front of my bedroom window) I was surprised & confused by a couple of "congratulations!" messages in my irc away-log. it took me a bit of time & coffee (& looking into my mailbox) to begin to realize that my Debian account had indeed been created while I was asleep. — in fact I guess I still haven't completely realized my new status as Debian Developer.

as others I'd like to follow the good tradition of taking the opportunity to thank some of the people who helped me to get there:

• first & foremost Tony Mancill, my advocate, permanent sponsor, & long-time co-maintainer; for all his support in preparing & quickly uploading packages, tracking down bugs, encouraging & advocating me but also for our very pleasant "chats" via email. — we have already agreed to continue co-maintaining each other's packages.
• the friendly & helpful guys from the Debian Perl Group: Gunnar Wolf, for always encouraging me (to join the group, to apply for the New Maintainer Process, ...); Damyan Ivanov, for teaching me so much (even if he called it "nitpicking"); Gunnar, Damyan, Krzysztof Krzyżaniak, Niko Tyni, Roberto C. Sánchez, Stephen Gran, Frank Lichtenheld, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Russ Allbery, Raphaël Hertzog, & some others for uploading packages I've prepared & helping me when I had questions or problems; Martín Ferrari, for all his help, expertise, & especially for the fun & the good times we share on IRC.
• my Application Manager Wouter Verhelst; for guiding me through the New Maintainer process not only fast but also in a very helpful, at the same time demanding & supporting way.
• the Debian Women sub-project; for making Debian a better & friendlier place not only for women but in general.
• finally: the people who used the time while I was asleep to actually create my account tonight :)

some final thoughts about the NM process from my point of view:

• it took me some time to actually apply for NM; what deterred me was not that I knew it would take some time but that I didn't know how long the time would be; & that I knew that the bigger part of the overall time would consist of waiting.
• I applied on 2007-04-03, my account was created on 2008-04-18; 380 days is not bad altogether in my opinion; the actual work with my AM was from 2007-08-12 until 2007-11-28 (i.e. 108 days, or 28% of the whole duration).
• I did enjoy the actual checks; I had to read & think a lot, & I learned a lot in that period.
• Front Desk (i.e. Christoph Berg) was very quick on all necessary steps.
• I was never demotivated about my Debian work because of all the people supporting me & taking the burden of uploading packages I had prepared. but I have to admit that I got a little bored in the last months of waiting after the report had been submitted by my Application Manager.

& now it's time first to celebrate & then to try to fully grasp my new rights & responsibilities.

Last week I did again some work on nagios-plugins. After the announcement of Dann Frazier to upload NMU to fix a trivial bug, I thought it’s time again to give some extra care to the package. So I prepared 1.4.11-2 fixing the important bugs and uploaded it. I also commited some minor fixes to the svn, so these issues will get fixed by the next upload. Since the development of policyd-weigh stalled and unfortunately maybe get stuck, I was looking for an alternative, which maybe found with postfwd. It’s quite flexible but it also will take more time (and care!) to get a reliable configuration, which maybe effective as policyd-weight (still) is right now. While checking the dependencies for postfwd I noticed that Net::DNS::Async isn’t available in Debian (yet). So I decided to create a package starting with dh-make-perl, join the Debian Perl Group and let it review. Damyan Ivanov was so kind to review and upload it, Gregor Herrmann did also give some much useful hints. Thanks to both! And yes, I also found time to step forward with NM, since I was overloaded the last weeks with usual work and life. Thank to my AM to be so appreciative.

Thanks to Damyan Ivanov for the upload, svn-buildpackage 0.6.22 is now in experimental. The upload was done to experimental due to the big number of changes affecting it and because I wanted to get a fairly significant amount of testing of the major fixes before propagating the code to unstable.

This release should fix 15 (yes, fifteen) bugs[0], most of which were important bugs or bugs affecting usability.

The major fixes are:

• mkdir -p like functionality in the repo for the tags and other possibly missing directories - this means that even repositories created with older broken versions should be fixed automatically[1]
  
• .svn/deb-layout is no longer a broken cache, but only a real local override for the layout information; .svn/deb-layout is created only on express request via --svn-savecfg; note that although .svn/deb-layout is no longer created automatically, old checkouts should be purged of this cruft (unless the override is wanted)
  
• build dependencies are not required on --svn-export
• automatic creation of the origDir when using origUrl
• some code clean up
  

Installing the package on an etch, lenny or sid system should be straight forward: just get the deb from experimental and install it (no backporting is necessary).


If you usually use svn-buildpackage, please install the experimental version and report any bugs and/or success stories. I am particularly interested in feedback related to the behaviour around .svn/deb-layout and the other methods of specifying layout information.

Please send success stories to me directly eddy.petrisor @ gmail.com. Bugs should be directed to the BTS, but I hope there will be mail just directly to me :-) .


[0] I wonder, does the thickness of the yellow area on these graphs ever decreases?
[1] as soon as the breakage would have been visible in the past

The first serious i18n effort for the Games Team is now bearing fruit. The newer version of the game hex-a-hop is now entering Debian. All the merit goes to Jens Seidel, who has developed the patches for making it work with SDLPango and to support all the spectrum of Unicode characters, instead of the limited ASCII set included in the game, as well as to all the people of Debian i18n who have done the translations (Helge Kreutzmann, Damyan Ivanov, Enrique Mat as S nchez, Bas Wijnen, Piotr Engelking, Yuri Kozlov and Clytie Siddall). The game has already been translated to Bulgarian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Russian and Vietnamese. Thanks Jens, both for taking care of the changes in the code needed to achieve this, and also for coordinating all the t10n and i18n process, as I don’t really have much experience in those areas.

Thanks to Florian Ragwitz, who packaged libpadwalker-perl 1.5-1, there is no blocker anymore that prevents libdevel-repl-perl from entering sid: By the way, the author of Devel::REPL, Matt S Trout, looks pretty happy to see his module entering Debian. I’ve just uploaded libdevel-repl-perl, this upload closes the exciting work session we did during all the weekend with Damyan Ivanov, in order to get the module into debian. All its dependencies are now in the Perl group’s hands. That was fun. Team maintenance rocks!

I decided to play with Devel::REPL which looks to be exactly what I need to enhance my Perl Console. That module is not packaged in Debian, then I started packaging it with the help of the Debian Perl Group (big thanks go to Damyan Ivanov for his help). The day was pretty productive and we’re almost done now, as you can see in this tomboy note: PS MadCoder: I’m sorry dude, I’m still speaking about Perl

Today was a strange day. We are preparing our holiday trip to Sicily but had a full day at home, meant for packing and the like. Indeed, packing was done in a few hours this morning and I ended up....hacking on D-I. For whatever reason, I came back on the plans we have, among the D-I team, to switch to console-setup for console handling. Something already done in Ubuntu and which brings, for instance and if I'm correct, the benefit of having the same keyboard maps for X and the console. So, first, I summarized the floating ideas in a wiki page. Then I worked on a few possible modifications to "localechooser", the D-I component that allows users to choose their language/country/locale and which needs modifications for console-setup. That lead me to produce an experimental image of D-I netboot for i386 and asked translators for some testing. MJ Ray noticed the call for testing and asked Esperanto translators for some testing, which Serge Leblanc did...and reported a nasty bug, later confirmed by Damyan Ivanov, then investigated by Anton Zinoviev, then digged a little more by me again, then advised by Rapha l Hertzog and Julien Cristau on #debian-devel-fr...and lead to an RC bug reported against....perl base. All this, of course, was completely unplanned as of this morning. This is probably one of the reasons that make me enjoy free software development.